A re-telling of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence, Francesca Segal’s debut The Innocents (Chatto, £14.99) takes the action to contemporary Golders Green. The daily minutiae of Jewish life are documented, from eating challah at Shabbat to the moments preceding a circumcision, alongside more sweeping statements: ‘For a people whose history is one of exodus and eviction,’ says Segal about ritual meals, ‘the luxury of repetition is precious.
As a subject for literature, virtue and its celebration is fairly unfashionable. This is particularly true in Britain, where we like to maintain ironic detachment. This perhaps explains why Robert B. Parker and his private eye, Spenser, have never found their way into regular dinner-party chat on this side of the Atlantic. In America, as this festschrift demonstrates, Parker is seen as the natural successor to Hammett, Chandler and Ross Macdonald, and Spenser the latest in a line that runs from the Continental Op through Sam Spade to Marlowe and Lew Archer. In his preface to the Fairie Queene Edmund Spenser wrote that his aim was ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline’.
In the middle of last summer’s riots, Mash, a member of a South London gang I have befriended, phoned me. He was standing outside a shop that was being looted. ‘It’s the funniest thing, Harry man,’ he declared. ‘This day I can go anywhere in London and there is no beef.’ Mash is usually confined by gang rivalry to a few streets around his estate. More astonishing even than the opportunity to loot was mixing with other young men without fear of being stabbed or shot. For the majority of Londoners like me, the riots proved terrifying. For Mash, it was the first time he had felt safe in his city. In his new book, Clive Bloom describes last year’s riots as a carnival for the disinherited.
With few exceptions, literary journalists moulder in the grave and are soon forgotten. They may get some sort of posthumous life if they are made the subject of other books. John Gross rescued a few from oblivion in The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters. Otherwise it is usually only those who were also poets, novelists or social commentators such as Matthew Arnold, who are not soon forgotten. When I was young, the Sunday papers were dominated by Connolly, Mortimer, Toynbee, Nicolson and Davenport. I delighted in them all, and equally in V. S. Pritchett in the New Statesman. All of course were excoriated by F. R. Leavis in stern puritanical Cambridge.
Impressed by Alethea Hayter’s A Sultry Month: Scenes of London Literary Life in 1846 (1965), which describes the close relations between Benjamin Haydon, the Carlyles and the Brownings in the summer of 1846, Hugh Macdonald has written a similarly ‘horizontal’ and highly readable biography of intersecting musicians in 1853. His theme is the relations, not always close, between Brahms, Berlioz, Liszt, Schumann, Wagner and a host of lesser figures in that year.
The singer of the ‘Lumberjack Song’, vendor of the Dead Parrot and leader of the Spanish Inquisition has written another novel. It is Michael Palin’s second, called The Truth. On the cover, a sticker certifies that this is the authentic text ‘as read on BBC Radio 4’, and on the back is a portrait of the national treasure gently smiling, as so often seen on BBC television. It is rather tiresome when publishers exploit electronic achievements to sell written works of fiction; but it would be unfair to penalise Palin for his celebrated niceness. His novel deserves to be judged on its own. The Truth is a very good story, very well told. The protagonist, Keith Mabbut, is a battered 56-year-old idealist who has betrayed his ideals.
Niall Ferguson, in his impressive and exuberant book Civilization, published last year, sought to explain why Western civilisation triumphed in the centuries after the Renaissance with reference to six factors. He identified them as competition, science, property, medicine consumption and work, or a particular work ethic. These historical tours d’horizon are never without their critics, and Ferguson’s confident account of what one had thought an undoubted historical phenomenon found a memorable one in the pages of the London Review of Books. The London-based writer Pankaj Mishra dismissed what he saw as a triumphalist tone, and refused to accept that those eastern civilisations which are now in the ascendant have learnt from the West.
This book, by the architectural historian Richard Davies, is remarkable in many ways — for the importance of its subject matter, for the excellence and variety of the many photographs, and for the imaginative choice of the accompanying texts. The fruit of ten years of long and difficult journeys in the far north of European Russia, it is a labour of love. It is also extremely informative. Russian wooden churches are very varied; because it is difficult to travel over such often boggy terrain, each region tended to develop its own specific architectural features. All, however, are built from logs of hewn pine; the carpenters used neither saws nor hammers and nails — only axes.
The headings set the scene: ‘Last Tango in Balham, in which I meet Marlon Brando on the dance floor of Surbiton Assembly Rooms but thankfully do not have to do anything with packet of country life.’ The essential premise in Melissa Kite’s breezy new collection Real Life: One Woman’s Guide to Love, Men and Other Disasters (Constable, £7.99) is: single girl (of advancing years) desperately seeks man and invariably ends up with the wrong one. Plus a great deal more of mundane affronts to do with TV remote controls that won’t work, Lambeth Council’s wheelie- bin regulations, and the challenge of filling in a passport application form. Real life. Possibly. The fun lies in the enjoyable unreality, the deftly orchestrated scenarios of chaos.
This is a book about what we, as a society, should do with hoodies — the familiar hooded young men, black and white, who rob, stab, shoot and sell drugs. Its author, Harriet Sergeant, is a middle-aged woman who works for the Centre for Policy Studies, a right-wing think tank. Should we hug these people? Or should we punish them? If I’ve understood her correctly, Sergeant thinks we hug them too much when they’re young, which means we must punish them for the rest of their lives when they get older. Actually, that’s not quite right. As a society, we don’t exactly hug young hoodies — we just don’t have the collective will to give them a structured, disciplined life. When they don’t do their homework, we don’t make them.
Stuart Evers’ debut short-story collection was called Ten Stories About Smoking, but even readers who are aware of this might be astonished by the multitude of burning cigarettes in his first novel, If This is Home. His characters smoke constantly, as if they are in the Forties film noir Out of the Past, where Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer are apparently incapable of breathing except through cigarette filters. Evers’ novel, also in common with Out of the Past, deals with grim secrets and failed personal reinvention. When Mark Wilkinson flees England and his non-descript northern town for New York City he seems at first to be leaving only the scraps of a misspent youth behind. He makes one close friend in New York and eventually changes his name to Josef Novak.
As a devotee of Fay Weldon I was amazed but nonetheless delighted by the change of her usual style. Set in 1899, her latest novel charts the lives and loves not of She Devils but Lord Dilburne’s household, both above and below stairs. The trademark Weldon wit is very much in evidence, only this time her characters are fetchingly clad in Liberty’s lace with leg-o’-mutton sleeves.England is tottering on the brink of huge change. The Boer War is being fought. Aristocracy and empire are breathing their last. New snobberies are overtaking the old. The story opens with filmic suspense. It is seven in the morning. Mr Baum, a Jewish lawyer, races up the steps of Lord Dilburne’s house in Belgrave Square to deliver catastrophic news.
Nicola Barker’s new novel is set in Luton. You could hardly find a place in Britain more emblematic of non-being. It has an airport; it used to make something or other, it is not in London, not in the Midlands; its architecture is frightful, its pretentious but tatty hotels are full of middle management businessmen, its streets full of Vauxhalls driven by men with delusions and tattoos. It’s true Barker territory: the utterly grotesque sheltering amongst the banal.
Francis Beckett has come up with an intriguing new brand of political history. The Prime Ministers Who Never Were selects 14 of Britain’s nearly-men and imagines how they’d have fared in the top job. The big beasts are reduced to footnotes and the prat-fallers occupy centre stage. Beckett himself writes the story of Labour in the 1990s without the modernisers, and 13 other contributors cover the rest. John Smith survives his heart attack in 1994 and wins a 99-seat majority in 1997. His first act is to scrap the Millennium Dome, which Beckett describes as ‘a now long-forgotten proposal to build a vast round shed in Greenwich … which no one could find a use for’.
Enoch Powell was defeated. He condemned Edward Heath for being the first prime minister in 300 years who entertained, let alone executed, the intention of depriving Parliament of its sole right to make the laws and impose the taxes of this country. But Heath was victorious: in 1972 he led the United Kingdom into the European Economic Community, and in 1975 the British people ratified this decision by a majority of two to one in a referendum. Powell thought this was a disaster. As he put it in 1976, with characteristic lack of understatement: ‘It is the nation that is dying, it is dying politically — or rather, perhaps, it is committing suicide politically — and the mark of death upon it is that it has lost the will to live.
In 1992 the Roman Catholic historian Eamon Duffy of Magdalene College, Cambridge published a large book called The Stripping of the Altars. Deploying a wealth of evidence, Duffy argued that the English men and women of the 16th century, especially in the provinces, did not really want to be ‘reformed’. They liked their old Catholic ways. The feasts and festival days fitted with the rhythms of the rural year. The architecture, furnishings and images of late medieval churches had given stability and comfort to parish communities. The common people only ever became reluctant Protestants. It is often said that history is written by the winners.
One of the fun facts you occasionally hear people brandish about Raymond Chandler is that he was at Dulwich College with P. G. Wodehouse. It’s a slight fiction —Wodehouse was actually there seven years earlier, so we can’t picture Chandler giving him a bog-wash — but one that sticks because of the contrast: good egg and hard-boiled egg. How could this suburban public school produce, at once, the laureates of Edwardian toffery and LA private-dickery? Reading Tom Williams’s absorbing new biography of Chandler, though, what struck me was not how different but how weirdly similar Wodehouse and Chandler are as writers.
The husband-and-wife team that is Nicci French wrote 12 standalone psychological thrillers before switching to a series with last year’s Blue Monday. Their central character, Frieda Klein, a psychotherapist who moonlights as a quasi-detective, returns in Tuesday’s Gone, together with a number of other characters, including the melancholy DCI Malcolm Karlsson and his team. The book begins promisingly with a Deptford social worker visiting a middle-aged woman with dementia, only to find that her client is serving tea and iced buns to a naked man sitting on her sofa. To make matters more piquant, the man is a rotting, fly-ridden corpse with a missing finger.
Whereas it is generally agreed that music has charms to soothe a savage breast, Congreve might have added that music also has the power to inflame bellicose fervour. Patrick Bade, who lectures at Christie’s Education and the London Jewish Cultural Centre, has written a commendably exhaustive history of how all sorts of music were used to strengthen civilian and military morale and to demoralise enemies immediately before and during the second world war. The BBC radio programme Music While You Work, for example, was believed to help make British factory workers contentedly productive. Musical propaganda broadcasts were supposed to convince Germans that we were patriotically more ardently motivated than they.
Reg Harris by Robert Dineen (Ebury Press, £16.99) is about a man who was once Britain’s number one athlete: a professional cycle track sprinter who dominated the worldwide sport for 15 years. And what is cycle track sprinting? It is racing on a prepared track with one or more opponents. It is also a form of torture. A great road race held over days or weeks, like the Tour de France, has been described as a Calvary. But track cycling is definitely torture. Like torture, the tools are simple but the variations are infinite. Like torture, it is a psychological contest. Like torture, the inner scars are indelible. The leading exponents of this cruel craft were traditionally French, Belgian, Dutch and Italian.